Quote:
Originally posted by theking
My point is the American military is a significant part of "tourism" in many countries...and that is a fact...which you want to avoid for whatever...misguided reasons you have in your wee little Webby mind. FYI...I do not take orders from the wee little minded people on the earth...so no I will not shut the fuck up.
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It is significant, but localized. US military on furlough tends to cluster around their base... for example, look at the communities that spring up around US bases in places like Okinawa.
In a matter of speaking, it is a form of tourism. However, because these people come to the base, it forms a sort of DMZ where a *hint* of local culture creeps in, but not enough to give the 'tourist' enough to have a finer understand of where he's stationed. Okinawa is a prime example... the environment there is radically different to that of Honshuu or any other part of japan, because of the heavy western influence. The heavily-visited communities around Paju in S. Korea are another example.
It seems to me that these 'cultural fusion' communities are part of the problem with US visbility overseas. It's in these areas where military personel 'act up' (get into fights, rape girls, commit crimes) because that's where they mostly hang out. As a result, people who're already distrustful of western culture subverting their own can point to those areas and say "See? Look how evil the west is. They come and rape our women there. No other place in our great land does this happen!" This happens regardless of the truth of the matter, of course... like many things, perception is more important than the facts.
Anyways, the point of the whole 'travel' meme in the first place is that people who travel the world and get first hand looks at how other cultures live tend to be more liberal, moderate, and less quick to resort to war or other agressive stances against the rest of the world. It's harder to want to kill someone after you've met them. The insulating effect of these 'base towns' from the real cultures reduces dramatically the effect of exposure to those cultures on military personel... which is part of the reason why the US Mil likes them, I would suspect.
Conversely, people who actually go to other countries purely for tourism purposes are more likely to be genuinely interested in other peoples, and will therefore be more likely stray away from the border towns, getting to the heart of those cultures and learning/experiencing far more.